OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) is a method for the determination of characteristic figures for monitoring and improving the efficiency of production plants. This criterion for process quality assessment is well established in many different industrial sectors including the automotive and paper industry. These characteristics help companies to reveal potential for optimization. Recent figures published by the Association of German Machine and Plant Manufacturers (VDMA) have shown that the pharmaceutical industry produces with an average OEE of only 24 %. This low OEE is the result of e.g. the insufficient availability and performance of machines due to long setup and cleaning times, unscheduled downtimes, inefficient processes and poor planning.

These obstacles can be removed in order to optimize business processes by

• improving the transparency of the utilization times of all machines,
• the comprehensive acquisition and analysis of potential sources of losses and
• the provision of production process information in real time.

Based on the following formula

           OEE = availability in % x plant performance in % x quality in %,

the OEE compares a plant's availability, performance and quality with the corresponding optimum. The OEE thus reveals the most frequent and important sources of productivity losses in the manufacturing process.

The interlinking of all data by the ProLeiT solutions also automatically provides options for OEE analyses along with detailed representations of the plant efficiency of individual lines and machines.
A plant's actual availability and other factors are determined automatically from the shift planning combined with scheduled downtimes and idle times for filling, cleaning, etc. The useful production time, and thus the actual performance characteristic, is determined from the automatic acquisition of faults and losses of production time caused by reduced plant speeds. Quality losses are determined on the basis of the deviation of the actual production from the rated output.